Watch the oldest video of The Feelies on YouTube— of the band playing “Crazy Rhythms” in 1979—and part of their considerable legacy as indie-rock forerunners begins to seem suspect, replaced by something even more intriguing. Founded in the mid-‘70s in New Jersey, the quintet is known for giving inspiration to bands like R.E.M. and Yo La Tengo, and their thoughtful jangle is heard in more contemporary easy-goers like Real Estate, too. The new acoustic-oriented In Between, The Feelies’ sixth album and second since reuniting in 2008, will probably get filed as “indie” on streaming services. But that’s just who The Feelies are to some of the people, some of the time.

Signed initially to Ork Records—the influential proto-punk label that put out early singles by Patti Smith and Television—The Feelies frequented the same circuit of New York venues, including Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, where that early video comes from, shot for New York public access television not long before the release of their debut album. Within a year or two, the band would semi-retire to their hometown of Haledon, transforming from their pogoing younger selves into The Willies (devoted to Brian Eno-influenced atmospherics and quadraphonic tape music), Yung Wu (fronted by percussionist Dave Weckerman) and playing in The Trypes (a local mystic-folk act), before turning back into a kinder, gentler Feelies.

But trapped on video in the front row of CBGB in 1979 is one particular skeleton key to the band’s music: a hippie, dancing ecstatically. Maybe he’s even an actual Deadhead. While the rest of the Bowery intelligentsia nod along appreciatively, this dude goes at it, locked into the not-so-secret piece that continues to make The Feelies different from nearly every band that has followed.

“You still see that sometimes,” says Glenn Mercer, the band’s singer, guitarist and chief songwriter, along with partner Bill Million. “That’s a high compliment, really. We’re not real comfortable performing to begin with, so I don’t like the idea of somebody just standing there watching the band.”

But it also shouldn’t come as a surprise. Together, Mercer and Million obsessively shaped The Feelies, playing nearly the same setlist over and over again as the songs changed subtly—energies building, arrangements shifting, lyrics getting rewritten, percussion parts being added—until each song hurtled forward with its own Feelies-like logic. After all, they did name their first album Crazy Rhythms.

And while the manic Feelies of the late-‘70s (who downed chlorophyll before shows for extra pep) are plenty different from the matured Feelies of the 21st century, it is the same sense of meticulous organization that drives In Between, as if each song is a small, particularly calibrated machine. They’re not likely to get hippies dancing, but the sense of movement remains palpable— the thrill of The Feelies relying on group dynamics.

“In 1976, we all fell in love with Another Green World by Brian Eno,” says Dave Weckerman, the band’s original drummer and current percussionist. “There were all kinds of things going on with that record, percussion-wise. We didn’t know what it was, but it sounded cool. That was the beginning of the extra percussive stuff, although we didn’t do it live yet.” Weckerman would briefly move to England in search of punk rock and, eventually, to a second percussion setup.

On In Between, despite a return to some of the acoustic feels of 1986’s The Good Earth (their first comeback album), drummer Stan Demeski and Weckerman create a firm and steady tock; what once kept the pogoing Mercer and Million tethered to earth now keeps the band from drifting into acoustic strumville.

No bongo-playin’ wind-chimer, Weckerman’s sharp pulses make for tight drama. “Every beat, everything in the band, is worked out way ahead of time, and once it’s set, that’s it. You don’t break from what’s been established,” says Weckerman.

Learning the original Crazy Rhythms songs “was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done!” he says. “It took me about two weeks of listening to cassette tapes, and Glenn would meticulously write out, like, ‘Second snare part comes in on the third bar of the guitar solo.’”

Though The Feelies have gotten quieter, and maybe a touch slower, the meticulousness remains. “You have to take notes and write it all down,” Weckerman says of his preparation for In Between. “For the new record, I have, like, a whole page of notes for each song.”

“We’re playing pretty simple music; it’s not like it’s fusion or anything,” says Demeski, a trained drummer who joined the band as a 19 year old in 1983, sharing the band’s love for The Velvet Underground. “There are only so many things you’d play anyway.”

Though it’s a cliché to talk about the things musicians don’t play, in The Feelies, it became a credo for their percussion arrangements, removing the extraneous, melodramatic cymbal parts favored by most bands, let alone ones with more than one percussionist.

“In The Feelies, we certainly didn’t want to be like the Grateful Dead or the Allman Brothers,” says Weckerman. “That gets to be redundant. And plus, those guys knew what they were doing and all that. The thing with The Feelies—with the double drumming—is we wanted to keep it very basic, and it wouldn’t be on every song because that would be redundant, so the drums would come in for certain parts and then go away. When we do cover songs at the end of the night, we do more Allman Brothers-like double drumming.”

“Right from the very beginning, Bill and I had the idea we’d get a drummer like [The Velvet Underground’s] Moe Tucker, with no frills,” says Mercer. “We found there was a lot of space.” While their taste in percussion hasn’t changed, the way The Feelies have occupied that space continues to evolve.

Recorded in Mercer’s basement, the band’s longtime practice space, In Between is perhaps the warmest Feelies album, acoustic guitars blending easily over the notso-crazy rhythms. Permeated with layers of ambient production, quietly mixed wordless vocals, bells, rhythmic clicks and occasional bursts of Frippertronic guitar, it is their most experimental album since their lost early- ‘80s period as The Willies, whose adventures only survive on a few live tapes and a hissy cassette compilation.

“We wanted to include the ambient stuff because we felt it added a lot of character to the mood of the record,” says Mercer. “Most of those parts were in place on the demo as well. We wanted the mixes to be layered in a way that allows the listener a chance to discover new things over time. I think, at this point, we’re not too concerned when writing with the thought of performance, and we’re thinking of records as a separate endeavor. In general, our records all have about the same number of parts, but this time, we really took our time to make sure everything occupied its own sonic space and didn’t get in the way of other parts. We spent a lot of time exploring the stereo spread to find an inte esting balance. One of the reasons we decided to record at home was to be able to be a little more experimental and to, hopefully, create more atmosphere in the process.”

Mercer says most of their work these days is instinctual, less fussed-over than the band’s only semi-mythologized early years. “We don’t really talk too much,” he says of Feelies practice sessions, echoing the title track of Crazy Rhythms: “I don’t talk much ‘cause it gets in the way,” Mercer sings there. “Don’t let it get in the way.”

Even if the band sounds more easygoing, however, The Feelies’ sense of mission remains paramount, and is still driven by that meticulousness. “Even as loud as we play sometimes, if you make a mistake, you’ll hear about it in the dressing room later,” says Weckerman. “It’s like playing with James Brown,” he adds wryly, minus Brown’s infamous fine.

It is a music that continues to define them. ecently, Weckerman says, he and Demeski went to see Wild Carnation, a band led by Feelies bassist Brenda Sauter. He was struck by how Feelieslike it felt, even though it’s one of their few spinoffs not containing multiple members of the band. “We’ve all got it imprinted on us, that driving Crazy Rhythms sound,” Weckerman says.

Demeski acknowledges that they don’t talk much, but being a Feelie can still carry its own demands. “They almost expect more out of you than they expect out of themselves, somehow,” he says of the bandleaders’ particular basement aesthetic, content to work at their own pace. During the ‘70s, the band only played a half-dozen shows a year, at the most. For most of The Feelies’ career, music-making is something that’s occurred primarily at home.

“They’ve always resisted the professional musician thing,” says Demeski. “They always wanted to be inspired. When you’re out on the road every night, you’re not going to be inspired. Ironically, we did play a lot, especially toward the end [in the early ‘90s], but all the playing is sort of what made us stop, too.”

Though they no longer have fi ed times to play, the jam sessions at Mercer’s house continue ever onward. While Million lives in Florida and Sauter lives in Pennsylvania, a rotating cast filters through, usually including Weckerman. “I’ll probably go there this weekend because a friend of ours is coming up from Atlantic City,” he says. “My drum set is always at Glenn’s. It’s been at Glenn’s for the past 25 years, maybe. It’s like Glenn’s house studio drum set.”

The sessions are purely informal. “Somebody’ll play drums,” Weckerman adds. Maybe Mercer, maybe Weckerman, maybe somebody else. “Maybe we’ll play acoustic guitars, you never know what’s going to happen. But we do that all the time because we like to play, that’s the thing. Sometimes we’ll do some of Glenn’s originals, sometimes we’ll do Feelies songs; we do a lot of covers.” And lots of jams, sometimes distant antecedents to new Feelies material. “We don’t record those sessions,” Weckerman says. “Probably many potential songs have just vanished into the atmosphere. But then, sometimes, a guitar riff will be remembered and we keep it and that becomes a new song.” Gradually. Slowly. As Demeski says, The Feelies’ songs aren’t terribly complicated, but like a painter working in a theme or mode, each generates its own nuances and surprises. Despite their fi ed-in-stone arrangements and the predictable showclosing combo of “Raised Eyebrows”/“Crazy Rhythms,” it’s still virtually impossible to predict exactly where The Feelies might swerve next. Even Demeski seems as if he’s stopped trying to figu e it out. “These days, [Glenn and Bill] seem to be more prolific than they used to be, too, which is pretty weird, but OK,” he audibly shrugs. Celebrating their 40th anniversary in mid-2016 with a pair of guest-studded shows in New Jersey, featuring members of Yo La Tengo and most of the band’s previous members, The Feelies continued to discover small paradoxes. A rock band that prefers staying at home to the hassle of going on the road, they are also a band worth seeing live over and over again, not because they jam their songs out, but because of the magical moments when their song-machines click together and come alive. Fan-traded Feelies live recordings sampled from diffe ent years reveal the band’s immutable battle cry against an ever-changing world, their setlist like a mantra that, most blissfully, continues to do its mysterious work. The songs remain the same